Vietnam buries remains of 731 war dead nearly 6 decades after the Tet Offensive

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Thousands carrying white flowers lined the roads in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City Wednesday as the remains of 731 people believed to have been killed during the 1968 Tet Offensive were taken for burial nearly six decades after their deaths.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Le Minh Hung attended the memorial services at Le Thi Rieng Park, where the remains were recovered from mass graves after over three months of excavations. They were laid to rest at Ho Chi Minh City Martyrs’ Cemetery in the city previously known as Saigon.

Generations in Vietnam have spent decades searching for loved ones who never returned from war, hoping to recover their remains, give them a proper burial and finally find some measure of closure.

Hundreds were buried in mass graves after bloody fighting

The Tet Offensive began on Jan. 31, 1968, when North Vietnamese communist forces launched coordinated surprise attacks across South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year holiday, known in Vietnam as Tet. One of the largest campaigns of the Vietnam War, it sparked fierce fighting and heavy casualties, including in the southern capital Saigon, where communist fighters attacked the U.S. Embassy, military installations and government buildings.

Although the communist forces suffered a military defeat, the offensive shocked Washington, undermined U.S. public support for the war, and became a turning point in the conflict. “The resultant conflict has changed the pattern of the war,” The Associated Press reported in February 1968.

The South Vietnamese government collected the bodies of communist fighters and civilians and buried them in mass graves during and after the fighting, according to Vietnamese government news.

The remains at Le Thi Rieng Park, which was previously the site of Do Thanh Cemetery, were discovered during excavations that began on June 23 at the park. Over weeks, excavators painstakingly unearthed bones and fragments, along with weapons, ammunition, military hammocks and personal belongings, said the Vietnamese government’s official news portal.

They discovered a wallet containing a faded military document bearing the name Huynh Van Quen, which helped authorities identify one of the dead as a soldier from the 1st Long An Battalion, a communist unit that fought a fierce seven-day battle at Saigon’s Y-shaped Bridge.

Among the mourners was Vo Huy Thinh, 70, who remembered watching bodies being buried there when he was 12. “The memory of that burial pit has stayed with me,” he told Vietnamese state media.

An AP photograph helped uncover the graves

For years, architect Nguyen Xuan Thang pored over photographs from the Vietnam War, searching for clues to the location of the burial site.

A breakthrough came when he found a color photograph taken by an AP photographer on Feb. 12, 1968, with a caption describing three large burial trenches that each contained about 300 bodies, he told state media.

The photograph shows two men carrying a body as two others look on. Three boys stand nearby, one of them wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and looking directly at the camera. A water tower is visible in the background, providing a crucial clue to the site’s location.

Thang told state media that he spent months riding his motorbike through Ho Chi Minh City, comparing old military maps with present-day landmarks, including the water tower. His research was part of a nearly eight-year effort, from November 2018 to May 2026, involving his team and the military, which helped authorities narrow their search to the park.

Investigators worked with researchers, historians, journalists and witnesses to piece together the location of the mass graves. They examined other wartime photographs, satellite images, military maps and archival records from Vietnam and abroad, comparing them with field surveys and accounts from people who witnessed the burials, said the Vietnamese government’s official news portal.

The long effort to identify Vietnam’s war dead

The recovery is part of a nationwide 500-day campaign running through July 2027 to locate the remains of about 7,000 war dead and identify them.

More than half a century after the war ended in 1975, many Vietnamese families are still searching for relatives who never returned home. The remains of about 175,000 Vietnamese soldiers have yet to be recovered, while hundreds of thousands more lie in graves without confirmed identities, according to government figures.

Of the 731 sets of remains recovered in Ho Chi Minh City, 307 were found with personal belongings, according to state media. Most have not yet been identified.

“Due to the harsh conditions of war and the passage of time, we have been unable to identify the names, ages, or hometowns of the majority of the martyrs in this group,” said Nguyen Manh Cuong, who heads the city’s war dead identification efforts.

Samples have been sent to the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi for DNA testing and comparison with samples from relatives.

Similar memorial and burial ceremonies will be held Thursday in three other parts of Vietnam, with the remains of what are believed to be 93 people to be buried in Tuyen Quang province. Another 65 will be buried in Hai Phong and 120 in Can Tho.